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Shelter-in-Place Photobook Count-Up

In a perfect world, we would have clear visibility to the endpoint of this COVID-19 crisis; if we did, our collective anxiety and uncertainty would be greatly reduced and we could calmly “count down” to the agreed upon end of this growing misery.

But sadly, this isn’t the case, at least for the foreseeable future, and so we have decided to attempt a logic reversal, at least as it applies to Collector Daily. You’ll now find a large, prominently placed counter on the sidebar of our homepage. This counter is a “count up”, a simple numerical tally of all the photobooks we have reviewed during the crisis, starting with the books we wrote about when the sheltering-in-place began here in New York two weeks ago.

We will increment this counter every time we post a new photobook review going forward, and hopefully it will give us a small feeling of accomplishment and control in a time when we don’t really feel those things much. We’ll stop the counting when it is safe to get back out to our usual stomping grounds – and whether the number is at that point 25, or 50, or more grimly even higher, we will at least have a measure of what we have done to try to support the photo community in this time of uncertainty. We hope you will encourage us from afar, wherever you might be, as we dig in to drive the total higher.

In the background in the past week, our writers have been busily checking publisher and artist websites and ordering books from across town and across the globe, trying to build up a workable backlog of 2019 and new 2020 releases. Hopefully those orders can be shipped, but if not, safety comes first, so we certainly understand that delays and outright prohibitions may slow us down. Whatever the situation, we expect to have a massive pile of new photobooks to tackle quite soon, and perhaps one or two additional voices jumping in with their incisive perspectives, so make sure you are checking bylines when you read our reviews, so you know who you’re listening to.

We can only guess at how this situation will change in the coming days and weeks, and we expect to adapt our plan as the circumstances evolve. For now, we’re going to point our boat in this photobook direction and start rowing.